TREE RECORDS! LENGTH 55 



COAST REDWOOD RECORDS 



The value of very long and old ring records is so obvious that 



every effort has been made to discover them. The coast redwood is a 



very available tree, growing to a great age, but its preference for the 



coast's even climate and its avoidance of winter snows led many years 



ago to doubts of its usefulness in these ring and climate studies. 



Moreover, about 1912 the late Julius Kapteyn did some counting on 



the rings of the coast redwood in the hope of finding climatic or solar 



correlations, but was disappointed. At any rate, the possibility of its 



usefulness deserved a real test and two groups of this species have been 



collected. 



SANTA CRUZ GROUP, 1921 



A trip made on February 20, 1921, was arranged through the 

 kind assistance of Mr. R. E. Burton, of the high school in Santa Cruz, 

 who took me out some 15 miles in a northerly direction from that city 

 to a point near Major's Creek, where redwood trees had recently 

 been cut. This location was in the upper part of the low range of 

 coast hills, but on the eastern slopes, so that the drainage was toward 

 the northeast and inland at that point. The first trees selected were 

 at the upper end of a gully, often dry; others were cut in the valley 

 bottom and others on the very steep slopes of a side-wash. The 7 

 specimens collected there were studied for months and no satisfactory 

 cross-identification was found. Trees 10 feet apart cross-identified 

 and gave apparently good records, but other trees 50 yards away 

 gave a different record which could not be identified with the first. 

 In the outer parts of some good specimens the rings would interlace 

 in a way never noted in the big sequoia; for example, some red rings 

 merged in one direction with the ring next outside and in the opposite 

 direction with the red ring next inside. Dating was therefore hopeless 

 and has not been accomplished to this day. The general age of these 

 trees was not great, probably from 300 to 700 years. 



SCOTIA TRIP, 1925 



The above negative result was not conclusive, for it might be a 

 characteristic of the locality chosen or of the southern redwoods only. 

 So the long auto trip of June 1925, described later, was directed to the 

 redwood region of northern California. We motored from Grant's 

 Pass, Oregon, to Crescent City, on the extreme northern coast of 

 California, and thence through those wonderful redwood groves to 

 Eureka and Scotia. At Eureka, the center of the redwood-lumber 

 industry, I consulted representatives of the Forest Service and was 

 referred to Mr. Percy J. Brown, whose mill and forests were on or near 

 the main highway to the south. The general area included a square 

 mile or so of bottom land some 30 feet above the level of the Eel River. 

 This land rises very gently toward the hills on the south, but the slope 

 5 



